Ron Lazzeretti placed the call to Michael Keaton from his hospital bed. It was December 2006 and Lazzeretti, a seasoned commercial writer and director, was putting together the biggest project of his career so far, his second feature. He’d written the script and had producing partners on board, and though he was laid up with a ruptured appendix, he was determined to get the star to sign on.
So Lazzeretti and his partners decided to find another director. “Michael wasn’t sure about bringing in someone else. We were seeing everything the same way. He was like, ‘I’m really excited about this story—I think I could do it.’ It felt like the cavalry coming in.” Keaton, they agreed, would direct, making his debut behind the camera, and Lazzeretti would stay on as a writer and producer.
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The Merry Gentleman, shot here over 26 days last March and April, debuts January 18 at Sundance in the Premieres section, which features noncompeting but highly anticipated films by indie and international directors. It will be the first feature conceived, financed, and made in Chicago to appear in the festival in several years.
From time to time they’d call in Tom Bastounes, a Second City alum who’d auditioned for them at EJ&L. “Tom wasn’t really in the industry anymore because he got tired of auditioning,” Lazzeretti says. “He was funny, but he was a pain in the ass. If he didn’t get the job, he’d call and say, ‘I just saw the commercial. I’m funnier than that guy.’”
Lazzeretti and Liberatore went their separate ways in 2000. Lazzeretti freelanced as a commercial director for a while before joining the ad agency Draftfcb as creative development director in 2006. Meanwhile he and Bastounes were developing The Merry Gentleman from a script by Lazzeretti that predated The Opera Lover, about an Englishwoman who witnesses a murder and then becomes entangled with both the killer and the alcoholic detective investigating the case.
After The Merry Gentleman wrapped, Lazzeretti returned to Draftfcb, which had granted him leave to work on the feature. In his spare time he’s working on a couple screenplays and putting finishing touches on the fourth and final chapter of a short film collection, Something Better Somewhere Else. The first three entries, “Flowers,” “Wedding Night,” and “Last Day,” have played the festival circuit, but he plans to reenter all four as a feature-length package. They show ordinary Chicagoans straining to find satisfaction in troubled marriages and the workplace and star local talent, including Tim Polk, John G. Connolly, Christian Stolte, and Will Clinger. “It’s like an old concept record where the different songs hang together,” Lazzeretti says.
